Talking all things innovation with Jon Coogan of the Mindset Mavericks Podcast

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Transcript:

have you ever wondered how companies ignite their entrepreneurial spirit and drive Innovation from within welcome to

mindset Mavericks where we dive into the minds of leaders driving the future of innovation today we're thrilled to have

Danny Nathan the founder of Apollo 21 on the show so Danny is Mastermind behind

Apollo 21 so a unique company is sitting at the intersection of innovation consultancy and product science

studio so Danny he's got two decades of product development experience he's worked with an impressive roster of

companies including American Express Getty Images Dyson amongst many more and

he's made a m name for himself by transforming Visionary ideas into real world successes through methodologies

like lean customer development and design Sprints and design Sprints is one of the topics we're going to discuss

today so get ready for ightful conversation overcoming Innovation challenges and exploring the future of

venture development let's jump in with Danny Nathan so welcome very much and thank you very much for joining me today

thank you for having me I'm excited to be here thank you um so what I want to go into first Danny is a bit about your

origin story really so I want to find a little bit about yourself and what made you start up Apollo 21 what was a what

was a driving factor that led you to start a polo 21 po 21 is sort of the

culmination of about 20 years of career experience I started in the world of advertising realized very quickly that I

didn't particularly enjoy it mostly because I was not excited about building a career in a world where companies were

paying to effectively shout in people's faces and tell them that they should be doing something or buying something or

whatever and so I made a point of getting out of the world of advertising

ended up Landing in an innovation consultancy that I helped build for about five years I was one of the first 10 hires or so and then that was sort of

my introduction to the world of Entrepreneurship and startups and uh really just kind of an eye- openening

experience around alternative ways of Thinking Beyond what I had learned to date in marketing and AD school um

around how companies and Brands can interact with customers and can really learn from and add value to the to the

lives of their customers while trying to effectively of course sell them something but in a much more symbiotic

Manner and so um I spent the next few years bouncing around a number of startups either that I had founded or

that other folks had founded and uh eventually in my last role I was serving as head of product at a startup in LA

and spent about the last year of my tenure there on kind of a little SWAT team where I was asked to help some of

the other portfolio companies from our uh primary investor with their technology needs and so I was doing work

then that looked a whole lot like the work that we do today at Apollo 21 and so after about a year of doing that um

my Founders and a couple of the folks from the family office tapped me on the shoulder and said you know hey you should think about going and doing this

you seem to enjoy it and so that eventually led to the creation of Apollo 21 which started a little over three

years ago now and uh so that's what I've been doing okay so just um just have interest so when you were looking to do

apolog for anyone you obviously wanted to do things a little bit differently what what specifically was it you wanted to change and what was it that you

thought Apollo 21 could do differently that wasn't being done before um you know you kind of nodded to

it in our in our little intro there I view Apollo 21 as uh unique in that we

sit at the intersection of an innovation consultancy and a product design studio and so really it is bringing together

those aspects of my past experience and taking a look at how we can layer the

two together and really think about the um the ways that companies are built and

the ways that products are built today in alignment with the innovation

goals especially with larger organizations so there's a lot of large ORS that you know claim to be inovative

that inovative excuse me Innovative talk about Innovation uh Etc and really when

push comes to shove it's a lot of talk but not as much action and so we built

Apollo 21 as a means to help those companies understand what the

organizational and the cultural impacts of a commitment to Innovation look like

with of course all of the skills at our disposal to then bring those ideas to life and help them actually get through

the make phase as opposed to just the you should phase and you know that's one of the things that a lot of folks

complain about or mention if you ask them about experience with other Consulting companies is that oh yeah

there's a lot of great ideas we heard a lot about what we should do and then they left and you know we were stuck

holding a big presentation or something but nobody was there to help us kind of Usher that that project forward and so

we are very much aiming to bring that gap between the well here's how to come up with ideas for what you could be

doing to Foster Innovation and then we can help you bring them to life okay

just one of the things that you use to bring those things to life I know you do some design Sprints um and and that's

something I've seen you talk about previously and you talk about on your website what how do you use those

designs Sprints to help with that process so design Sprints are just kind of one tool in the toolkit um generally

when we engage with a client we start with some sort of Discovery period and it's usually about 4 weeks of us really

digging into their business and it's an opportunity for us to understand clearly what the problem is often you know the

problem that comes to us and the problem that is the one that needs to be solved aren't in direct alignment you know

sometimes somebody will come to us with a symptomatic problem of a deeper issue and so we really focus on helping kind

of uncover what that deeper issue is and understanding how it then results in whatever that that symptomatic problem

is and so our Discovery period allows us to dig into that to learn about our

clients and their business and what their goals are and how that problem is hindering them and so it's an

opportunity for us to hold anything from stakeholder interviews where we're talking to a bunch of folks within the

building or within the organization uh to talking to customers and helping begin the customer development process

and then sometimes not always that will then result in a design Sprint or something of that sort to begin ideating

alongside our clients what that solution is how it might come to life how it aligns to their business and the

capabilities that they have in house so that we can create something of value

for their customers and for their business that really does help them their efforts in Innovation and their

efforts in growth in terms of finding new opportunities for new business models uh new Revenue lines

Etc yeah I think what be ready handing you spoke a lot about um how in depth

you go and how much you really kind of foster that relationship with with your customers to um solve these problems it'

be quite quite good certainly for me to hear some of the success stories or some of the types of problems you are solving

for um customers if you've got any examples of of the kind of thing that you are innovating in yeah I'm happy to

you um and it's one of the things that's so exciting about our businesses the problems are always different and so the

solutions and the things that we get to dive into are always unique for every project so um we are relatively industry

agnostic we've done work across uh remote guarding and security restaurants

Sports Etc and so to give you a couple of concrete examples um one of my favorites is we had a client in the

western Sports space so think Cowboys and rodeos and you know bull riding and all that fun stuff and um that project

started off relatively small they had acquired a few other companies and had a bunch of data from those companies that

they knew they wanted to take advantage of but didn't really have any way to understand or dig into because the data

had been delivered to them from I think it was five different companies in the form of like a hundred different csvs

broken out across you know Advertiser data and customer data and ticket buyer data and etc etc and so we started off

by just building them an internal platform into which we uh ingested and then normalized all of that data and

gave them some insights and analytics views of how they could be to understand what they had at their disposal and then

to make a long story short that engagement ended up lasting about a year and really gave us the opportunity to

build out the internal and operational technology infrastructure for their organization and then also build out

some customer facing uh technology as well in this case in the form of kind of

an ESPN for Rodeo type of application and what was so exciting about that was

because we were deeply ingrained and because they had great access into the industry we were able to really focus on

the customer development process and understand what uh Rodeo fans were

missing from the rodeo experience in terms of technology and also what the athletes were missing so what started

off as an effort to build two different applications one for athletes and one for fans really ended up becoming a

singular experience digitally because what we found in our research was that

uh drawing the line between a rodeo athlete and a rodeo fan is really diff because a lot of fans who enjoy watching

rodeo at the professional level enjoy participating at a you know Regional local amateur level and so those people

consider themselves athletes and by helping them bridge the gap between the experience of being a fan and being an

athlete I think we were able to help create an experience that um really was

more holistic and made everybody feel like they were part of what was going on in the world of rodeo regardless of

whether they were a quote weekend Warrior or whether they were you know out there on the big stage getting paid

for what they do and so that was really exciting another great example more in

the operational space uh we've had a number of clients come to us that had

some sort of operational problem and so it is not unusual for us to work with our clients to tear down their internal

technology systems and rebuild from the ground up something that will help them Usher how work happens within the

organization and so we did work like that for financial services clients we've done that for

remote guarding in security and a number of others including some aspects of the rodio client as well okay so yes it say

it does sound like it's a really broad diverse area that they're working in what um what do you think are the

biggest challenges really to to Innovation within companies I think the biggest challenge that companies have

today is that as they grow and as they discover product Market fit and begin to

think about how to build efficiency into their operations so that everything

moves smoothly and so that they can effectively ring every dollar out of every penny that goes in they also kind

of wash away the opportunity for Innovation and so what you see is that companies are aligning their operations

to the ideals of efficiency to the ideals of protecting capital investment

and aligning those operations to quarterly earnings and trying to ensure that those earnings grow grow quarter

over quarter and year over year and the problem with all of that when it comes to Innovation is that for better worse

Innovation is inherently a inefficient process from both a capital perspective and a Time perspective and a resource

perspective you have to spend the time and the energy to think about and

explore and experiment to figure out where the opportunities for Innovation are and those activities do not align

well to the level of efficiency that most mature companies are looking to establish yeah I think it is that that

whole old saying of speculate to accumulate is one of those things where like I said it takes resources takes

time takes money but without that you can't get that Innovation that could lead to great things so I think that's

definely um yeah definitely what seem to be coming across yeah absolutely I think the other big thing to to keep in mind

there is that you know the way that really the way that you establish a culture and we talk a lot about a

culture of innovation for example and for me what that means is enabling employees to experiment and to try

things and ultimately to encounter failure along the way without having to

be concerned with repercussions and so you know employees inherently are

concerned about whether their job is going to be safe Etc if they are doing things that are interpreted as failure

and so the more we can help re-envision the idea of failure as learning

opportunity and learning experience then the safer people will feel to explore those

Endeavors yeah and and what ways does apoll 21 for example kind of foster that

culture of innovation so I know certainly we you've just touched on it um a little bit there where you do give

some autonomy and let people run with ideas and and test things out and be supportive of those these are particular

things that you put in place to kind of foster that um Innovation within your workplace uh yeah so within our own

walls we we operate fully remotely in what we call a row a results oriented or results only work environment and for me

that is one of the foundational aspects of our effort to create a culture where

people feel like they have not only the freedom to explore and fail but really just the freedom to do their jobs in the

way that best suits them and so you know for us as long as your work is being

accomplished and you're attending you know the hopefully few meetings that we do have on the calendar um I don't

really care when and where you're getting it done if you want to work from a beach in Tahiti that's amazing and if you want to work

at your desk in La then that works also and everything then unfolds from there

in terms of how our team has you know sort of the opportunity on the right to

explore things to try things to experiment with new technology to bring ideas to the table we have an open

system for submitting uh what we call Charters or you know project ideas where

anybody in the company can grab that document create a copy and start to fill it out with the outline of whatever idea

is that they have in their mind and ideally to then begin experimenting with validating that idea without needing to

get permission and so you know we try to create a space where people really do

feel like if there's something that comes to mind they have an opportunity to try it out and then to bring it to

the table and talk to the rest of the team about it so that we all have an opportunity to either get on board or to

question it constructively or see where it might go yeah no I think that's good idea and I think it's it's something I

certainly try and Foster is if people come to you with um with uh idea for

something or or you've got a challenge within your organizations is try not to be that first person to speak I think people do naturally if you are a leader

within a business they'll sometimes agree a little bit too much it's nice to put those ideas out get those ideas come

back first and just let opportunity to speak exactly just there a couple of

bits that you don't want to touch on and is around just building a business and Leadership and I know you did mention

that you've um been involved in startups and a number of businesses advertising Etc before uh starting Apollo 21 so was

Apollo 21 your your kind of first founding business or did you have others before that no I've I've failed multiple

times before Apollo 21 it is I don't know it depends how you want to or how you want to count um it is not my first

time my first company uh my wife who was my girlfriend at the time and I started

together as sort of an iteration of what might happen for couples who met online

and of course that that whole world has changed now and you know this was pre- Tinder and pre you know app swiping and

so on and so forth but um that was in 2012 that we started that and there's

been a number of other companies in the interim we also have a couple of companies that we run as sort of side

businesses so I have an e-commerce business that uh chugs along every year now and um you know earns a decent

little bit of Revenue it's nothing amazing and it certainly doesn't pay for for our lives or even our rent but it's

just fun and gives us a uh what I call a place to experiment you know it's our it's our science lab so it's the um it's

the company that we can try things with and fail with without quite as much concern for repercussions because

there's no employees to be concerned about or anything like that yeah and you know I love hearing about failures as

well similar to your own story really I've had a number of businesses um currently got an e-commerce business as

well as my kind of day job business as well so it's it's good to hear that people having similar experiences and I

think one of the things that does put people off businesses are certainly trying again is failure so it's good to hear that other people are going through

similar things and have similar kind of background and not been afraid to um to

try again if something does fail so what where did you get that mindset from to although you've had some setbacks what

is it that made you keep going I have always just sort of had this tenacity and need to build and create things and

um to be frank I've never really enjoyed the idea of a corporate job and

therefore I've never really held one down and so the you know I've worked at smaller companies and the ultimate end

state of that for me has always been working for myself and so a lot of it has been EXP experimentation to enable

that to happen and then I've also developed I've really I've developed a bit of a personal Mantra which is fail

beautifully and it's just a constant reminder to myself that failure is going to happen at every step along the way

and that unlike what we were taught as children failure isn't a bad thing and you know to me that's one of the biggest

mindset shifts that we as people need to get to as we go from you know younger

years into adulthood where we're Tau from a young age that failure is a negative thing and that you know it is

representative of all things bad and what I have come to realize over the years is that failure is just another

way to figure out what isn't working and what you might want to try next and so I have I have tried to embrace that

personally and to continually remind myself that you know to your point everybody has moments of failure and

everybody tries something that doesn't work and you know part of the problem especially these days with you know the

way that social media has changed the world is that generally if you're looking from the outside in what you see

are the you know successes or at least the perception of success that somebody is trying to put forward and so having

that reminder that you know everybody goes through it everybody fails has always been a a grounding mechanism for

me absolutely I love that term as well fail beautifully I'm definitely going to be using that one in the future please

please do so as as we've talked about you've got a lot of experience over 20 years um in kind of innovation and

product development so one of the things I wanted to ask about really is um how you've seen technology changing

what you're doing over the years certainly with things like web 3 AI and

and then both being huge at the moment how have you seen technology change the way we innovate it depends how far back

you want to go so you know as I noted to when I started in advertising I was sort

of one of the last classes out of ad school that was not taught about technology so my experience in AD school

was TV spots and magazine ads and newspaper ads and what I ended up finding so frustrating this was back in

the early 2000s was that the lack of uh consideration around technology and the

connectivity that it afforded between companies and Brands and their customers

and the people that are interested in them was that in the world of advertising that grown up in you know it

was a it was a shouting match it was who could shout loudest to get their name to to ring in your head and um right around

the time that I left advertising and started my first role in an innovation consultancy was also literally about two

months after the first iPhone came out and right around the time when social media was becoming ingrained in society

and so what was so interesting at that time was to watch how rapidly the

interactions between people and brain Brands changed based on the level of accessibility that people had so all of

a sudden as everybody gravitated towards social media Brands had Twitter accounts and at the time of course they were

manned in a way that sort of sat outside of the the norm of customer service and

so they became almost like this gateway to getting more attention from companies that would otherwise be difficult to get

help from for example and so they really changed the dynamic for how people in

companies interacted with one another and then ultimately I think the bigger driver behind all of it is the uh the

ability for technology to enable a value exchange between customers and companies

that was much harder to do before you know if you look at pre- Technology Days

the you know the value exchange between customers and companies was I pay you I get blank and now it's really changed

and the opportunity for companies to be drivers of community and drivers of Education in addition to selling

products and services has created an entirely new Dynamic that has been

heavily accelerated by technology and so as you move forward and you begin looking at the things that you know that

you called out like web 3 and AI what we're seeing again is a change in the

Dynamics of how people interact with technology and therefore the brands that

are using that technology and in both instances of you you know both web 3 and

AI I think in many ways we're almost too early to see what the the real ramifications will be and it's almost

unfortunate in that the way that AI for example has been used heavily so far has

been in content creation for example and while it's great for saving people time

it's also not the most amazing content it's there and it's got the facts behind it usually uh n a few madeup whatevers

that you know some computer hallucinate but what we're seeing today is that companies are utilizing AI as a way to

inundate people with you know SEO driven articles or whatever and so I think that

frankly we're still in the midst of figuring out where that value exchange is going to come back into balance and

how things like AI are going to help kind of find that um unique interaction

point between people and people in Brands and so on and so forth and so

that's part of what as we at Apollo 21 think about Innovation we focus on very heavily is you know we hear a lot of

companies saying we need AI relate to the AI game Etc and the reality is yes

you need to be paying attention AI isn't going anywhere it's going to change everything but it's also not one of

those things that every single company needs to rush out and start implementing its scale yet until they understand what

the purpose of it is for them specifically and I would say the same with web 3 you know there's some really

interesting use cases but so far a lot of companies and a lot of a lot of people in general don't entirely

understand the web 3 space and I think we're still trying to find in many ways kind of similarly the value exchange

that's going to happen there and so ultimately I think that as technology

progresses we we go through these cycles of Technology being new and interesting and being used anywhere and everywhere

that we can think to put it and then through that we then end up with a um

you know a process of narrowing down and figuring out okay we tried it everywhere where do we want to keep that technology

and where is it really helping yeah I I was thinking about it as you're talking there and it's seems to be at the moment

people are relying on AI rather than utilizing it so you do you do get that lack of human connection the lack of

let's say just personality added into those posts because you do see a lot now which are generated and they do quite

they do come across very formulaic so I think definitely definitely does need to

be a bit of leveling out really I agree I think that uh I think the next couple of years are going to be really

interesting as we see you know again much how much how mobile devices and you know the smart device changed everything

I think that we're on the break is seeing you know another shift that we're just now in the process of figuring

out are you currently seeing any Trends in corporate Innovation at the moment

you getting uh I know you said got quite a diverse customer background and basis

but are you seeing any trends at the moment in terms of innovation within companies I think at the moment what we're seeing is a lot of companies kind

of Towing the party line of you know discussing how they're Innovative and talking about things that represent the

ideals of innovation but are not quite jumping in with both feet yet to embrace the realities of what

that means and I think I think there's a fair number of companies that are starting to realize that and starting to

kind of play with the idea of okay how do we do more how do we make innovation mean more and I think that one of the interesting trends that we're seeing

lately is um more of a focus on corporate venture capital and the idea

that companies committing to Innovation doesn't necessarily have to mean standing up a Skunk Works office

somewhere and you know putting Five Guys in there with a budget and saying here go come up with something but rather

more diversity around how companies view what Innovation means and how they can participate so whether that is investing

in or incubating new smaller companies that are aligned or adjacent to their

Core Business offering but that they need to keep some separation with and so you know I think that's a really

interesting space and a really interesting way that especially larger and more mature companies can help

bridge the gap with the startups that are coming to disrupt whatever space they're in and so the benefit of that is

I think we see a little bit less fear around the idea that a disruptive startup is going to to come up from

behind and you know eat your lunch so to speak but now there is an alternative way to interact with that company

through partnership and investment Etc that enables more established organizations to both protect themselves

in their own future as well as helping the Innovative disruptors that are

changing the way that things are done continue in their growth one of the things you just touched on that is about

um what Innovation means to businesses in in your own words what does innovation mean to you that's a really

good question that I should probably have a ready answer for off the cuff and I don't but um I think just sort of

spitballing innovation to me is the exploration of new ways to accomplish things and new ways to serve customers

that enable companies to create longevity and to discover new ways to

maintain relevance that they might not otherwise sort of align

to and if a company is is want to be Innovative they want to start looking at

um processes and how they can improve what they're already doing where's a good place to

start uh well if I can plug myself for a little bit uh for a moment here ap21 is

offering a like a two-day Innovation Sprint that we call an accelerated Innovation lab to help companies answer

exactly that okay and so the starting point that we put forward through that

process and hopefully the answer to your question here is we will sit down with those organizations and help them uh

articulate what their goals are with Innovation figure out what Innovation means to them and help them understand

and outline uh what resources they have at their disposal that give them a clear-cut Advantage because the reality

is that highly established and mature companies do have a huge Advantage when it comes to Innovation and trying new

things in that they have a ready pool of resources usually they have Capital that

they can dedicate to that process they have a whole team of people who are interested in and spending their days

exploring and you know figuring out how to serve customers in that space who then have a whole pool of ready-made

ideas that that company could pull from and so we help companies sit down and figure out what those resources look

like and what the ideals of innovation are that they want to uphold and how

they can do that internally whether that's through investment or through partnership or through incubation or

through some combination of all three and so through this offering we spend a couple of days really outlining all of

that and giving them a means to continually evaluate a framework for

evaluation of those ideas moving forward and then of course we can help them put those ideas into action and bring those

efforts to life or they're welcome of course to take the output of of that effort and run with it themselves either

way yeah one certainly one of the problems I faced um when I first started a business had a a lot of involvement

with Logistics and the backend systems fre eCommerce Etc and one of those at at

that point in your career you don't necessarily know what you need to do to be Innovative or how you can streamline

your processes is that something you would still recommend people for example come speak to yourselves about where you

want to be better you have got all all the things which you might have in place but it might not be the most Optimum way

of doing things is that something people come to you where they're they're not actually really sure what the is is but they know they want to improve yes

without question that is actually probably I don't know at rough guess at least half of our businesses companies

coming to us with exactly that type of question of hey we know something's working we can't exactly figure out how

to fix it or how to pinpoint it or we know that technology can help in our operations but we aren't the technology

company and we don't know how to to put that together so uh to give you a couple of concrete examples and I nodded to

this earlier we had a financial services client for example that came to us and basically their question was we're

drowning an email can you help and that that was the extent of kind of what they brought to the table and so you know as

I was describing our Discovery process earlier that was a really good example of where internal stakeholder interviews

played a huge role in our Discovery process and our ability to understand that the reason that these folks were

drowning an email was because their process consisted of email for example so every single activity that happened

within their walls resulted in an email to somebody and of course you know when you think about that it's no no surprise

that they were drowning an email and so what we ultimately helped them build was a piece of operational software that was

designed explicitly for them around the three most timeconsuming and important

processes that we worked with them to identify really guided their employees

through the execution of those processes with all of the rails in place and all of the automation that we could you know

muster uh in place so that it would streamline their internal operations and

limit the number of emails that they were sending and I think that the I think the result was something like a 92% drop in emails in their inboxes um

so that was that was a huge impact and yes you know I think that the other side of what you're nodding to John is that

um you know Innovation we often think about how it might impact customers or consumers or what it might mean for

inventing something new but it doesn't have to you know Innovation that happens within your own walls and helps uh

streamline things for your own employees is just as valid and Val viable as a

Innovation that is consumer focused and so I think that that's an excellent place to focus and really a great way to

dip a toe in the water of innovation you know if you're not sure how you want to think about innovation in terms of its

impact on your customers but you know that you have opportunities internally use your own Workforce as your um you

know as your test bed and you know we're happy to come in and help and demonstrate how we can help innovate in

that space and hopefully then demonstrate that you know if we can do it for you internally of course we can

do it on behalf of your customers as well yeah that's really interesting and like I say 92% reduction is going to be

huge amount of time savings and and for any company so yeah that's that's great to hear some of the things you are doing

when you haven't got specific goals in mind when you when you meet some of your clients um absolutely and it's quite

clear clearly still very passionate about Innovation and what you're doing at the moment how do you keep up that

passion for Innovation and Venture development after 20 years of doing it I have found that there is no

shortage of problems to solve and that's the part of this whole thing that really

at least keeps my interest peaked is frankly when I see a problem I I just can't help my brain starts spinning on

huh that's a problem how can I solve it where would technology come into play How could we make it easier who's going to benefit is there a monetization

strategy there um which is how inevitably my side businesses end up starting you know I I go to do something

for myself my the side business that I nodded to earlier is uh designing and

building accessories for off-road camping Vehicles okay because I had an off-road camping vehicle and I found

things that I didn't have that I wanted and so I went and made them and figured if I wanted them somebody else might as

well in this case it proved to be true and one of my next question is

going to be how you continue to learn about Innovation yourself but I think you partly just covered it there is just

keeping that curious mind all the time and keeping your mind open and and looking for opportunities is there other

things that you do in particular to try and keep your yourself fully involved in Innovation and keep on top of

developments yeah I mean part of that is surrounding yourself with people who are similarly curious and then creating an

environment where everybody can share and so you know for me that is uh my internal team and our clients and so on

and so forth and so we have you know just a constant feed going around of oh

hey did you see this oh hey this company is doing this now oh hey you know check out this thing that's cool and the other

part of it um for years now I've just sort of had a mindset of when I see something interesting that's new I go

and sign up for it and you know other than the you know the NeverEnding amount of you know emails in the inbox from

marketing and stuff that can be filtered out it's a really great way to just

consistently try things and figure out what other folks are thinking about how other folks are utilizing technology and

that always Spurs ideas of you know interesting they applied this technology in this way to solve this problem that's

sort of similar to what I'm thinking about over here I wonder if I can you know borrow some inspiration from how

they have solved that problem and with that in mind because it sounds like you've got a really good team around you as do you think that the remote working

has affected how you do have those conversations and how you can innovate have you found that um remote work and

has had impact I'm I'm personally a huge fan of remote work I'm also a huge fan

of teamworking collaboration and the two are somewhat at odds with one another you know anybody who you hear advocating

heavily for a return to office for example um generally points at the

collaborative nature of being in the same building Etc and I will not disagree in the slightest that there is

value there however I also question whether that value is outweighed by the

cost of having an office and the limitations of only being able to hire

people who live or are willing to move near that office for example and so the

benefit for us of being remote is that it opens up our ability to work with

people you know anywhere that they are and to bring in experts in whatever we

need without having to worry about getting them to a certain geographic location um the other thing that I

really enjoy about remote work is the freedom of enabling that kind of results

oriented work environment that I mentioned earlier because it really gives everybody the ability to have a

balance in terms of how they choose to live their life you know there's no question of oh you need to go pick up your kids from school or you need to run

to a doctor's appointment or whatever you know not only do I not care you don't need to tell me just go it's fine

and so to me that outweighs the the benefit of onsite collaboration however

it does require tooling then that you know enables you to maintain the connectivity that you need in that

remote environment and so you know our team of course lives in slack and we do a lot of work in uh collaborative tools

like figma and fig Jam for example where everybody can be in the tool at the same time seeing the same thing but

contributing uniquely what works for one company won't necessarily work for another but we have found the tool set

that seems to work for us that enables communication and of course we've worked hard to set up all of the necessary

Automation and so on and so forth so that if somebody makes a change or a comment over here you know it gets

alerted to us in places that we're we're sure to see it and then beyond that it's

building a team that understands the value of communication and so so as long

as everybody is committed to communicating clearly and letting everybody know you know hey I'm not going to be around for the afternoon or

I need to go run an errand or whatever or hey I have a question about this you know piece of work or this ticket in

GitHub or whatever it is um as long as all of that is communicated clearly I have found that we're able to keep

things moving quite nicely with a remote team and it's also trained us really

well for working remotely with clients you know it's we're always happy to get on an airplane and go see a client but

at the same time sometimes it just doesn't pay to you know travel across the country for an hour meeting or something and so um you know knowing

that we know how to work remotely amongst ourselves then influences how we interact with our clients and how we

bring them into that that work stream but yeah it definitely means the the more exposure you got to a remote work

in and and things like this remote podcast which wouldn't have been around 5 10 years ago definitely does start to

become a little bit easier and people do start to start to feel a bit more comfortable with certainly alien to start with so I can I can agree with

yeah most of what you said there and certainly just being a to choose your resources from anywhere so as you've

said I I could have somebody in Toronto working for me and yeah it's amazing

just to be able to have such a wide pool to choose for yeah it makes a huge difference for us what I wanted to just

go on with on to now really is just talking about you've got clients all over the place um you've got quite a

wide range of clients if you got an ideal client what would that look like to you for us an ideal client is less

about a specific industry or vertical and more about either the stage that you're at in your company and or where

you sit and so generally um we engage with seite Executives or at larger

organizations you know folks who have the word innovation in their title uh are often a good client for us we often

engage with customers who do not have a technology team so you know we do really

well working with customers who either their business has been around for a little while or in spite of being uh

Tech motivated as I call them they are not you know technology enabled or a technology company and so that allows us

to come in and really sort of help bridge the gap and help them understand how to become more technology enabled

and more technology efficient and so you know often that's anybody from scale

upsized startups who are looking to move Beyond thing doing things that don't scale you know the old adage of start

your company by doing things that don't scale and I agree with it completely but at some point if you you know if you're

successful in doing that you then get to a point where you go oh okay now we actually need to start doing things that do scale and that's you know that's a

great playground for us especially as we were talking about operational technology and building efficiency and

workflows inside you know inside the walls and then as you get into larger and more mature companies um you know a

lot of the Innovation that work that we do is focused on helping to talk to customers go through the customer

development process understand where pain points are that align to that company's offering and then ultimately

to help them Envision and create new Revenue lines and new products to fulfill on those needs and so companies

that are looking for that type of change are really where our our ideal client

Falls and with that in mind really we've got listeners who are going to be budding entrepreneurs is there

particular advice you think you can give to butting entrepreneurs are looking to start their um their business or looking

to found a company something that could help them at the beginning yeah there's a couple of

things that come to mind usually throw out my fail beautifully mentality at this question which we've already talked

about but the other piece of advice that I often give to early stage Founders is

it will take longer than you think it will and it doesn't matter what it is but it will take longer than you think

it will and so growing comfortable with that and learning how to live with that is one of the things that will help set

you up for Success um the other thing that I will offer for very early stage

uh Founders is um most folks have an idea they you know they land at what I

call the napkin stage of oh oh I want to build a blank for blank that does blank

and it'll be awesome um and usually when somebody gets to that point their knee-jerk reaction is and now I must go

build an MVP and my biggest piece of advice is don't don't do it yet go talk

to potential customers find the people that you think want the thing that you scribbled on the napkin and ask them all

the questions that you can think to ask them and figure out whether the brilliant idea that you scribbled on the

back of a napkin is actually a brilliant idea or whether it was only a brilliant idea you know 2 a.m. or whenever

whenever it hit the back of the napkin um and I believe in that so much that we are are literally in the process of

developing a pre accelerator program for napkin stage Founders to help them

through that process so uh our program is designed explicitly around no wait

don't go build your MVP go talk to people first so that you know what your MVP needs to be that's really

interesting like I said it just make sure it resonates and one of the things um clearly needs to be done is market

research get speaking to people don't away with things so I'm quite intrigued by the program he starting to do what

what's that actually look like in practice so I'm going to answer that question happily but I'm also going to

caveat it with we're still figuring it out a little bit but what we're envisioning is probably 8we accelerator

program that will be a combination of individualized work that will guide

Founders through the process of conducting paino interviews discovering where their pain

where their customers pain points line to their idea working through storyboard interviews to help those customers then

understand what it is they're looking to build and then ultimately finding that

kind of product Market fit idea and beginning to articulate what the core requirements are that they could bring

to life ideally with the solution being you know okay I had a napkin idea that

had five core features but through talking to people I have found that I only need two of them somebody gave me

another feature idea that I never thought of and when I started teasing that with more you know more people that

I was talking to that really resonated so now that's one of our features um and then beyond that you know helping folks

understand sort of what they're getting into in terms of what it takes to build a company so basically what we're

envisioning is every week it would be self-guided work combined with a cohort

wide meeting to discuss where everybody's at and to share learnings and ask questions one one meetings with

the Apollo 21 team uh be that our head of product or head of engineering myself whoever makes the most sense for where

that founder is and then also guest lectures from folks in anything from

branding to design to data to Legal structures fundraising and what it takes to go out and build a fundable deck Etc

all kind of crammed into a crash course of as I said about eight weeks that sounds really good just yourself and for

that program in particular where can we go to find out more details what's the best way getting in contact with you and

following you and and what Apollo 21 is doing yeah uh best place to find us is

on our website it's Apollo 2.io that's number two number one um the

pre- accelerator program is in the ventures portion of our website so click on the Apollo 21 Ventures logo anywhere

that you see it um and then of course Apollo 21 is active on socials usually Apollo 21 iio or Apollo 2.io is the

username and I am also active on socials and spend a bunch of time in LinkedIn and things like that I am personally uh

blah blah blah slash among many on most socials okay and um if anybody happens

to be in the New York area and listening I also run a monthly Founders dinner for technology folks to get together and you

know actually meet one another and sit out over a meal so I do that every month and more than happy to have people join

oh fantastic I've really enjoy our chat today so thank you very much for being on um it's definitely pleas thank you

yeah there definitely a few takeaways but I think my favorite one is just failing beautifully I think that's a

wonderful term that we should definitely be embracing um just for a final call to action really is so any particular tips

or any advice that you can want to finish off and leave with our listeners always know where your next piece of

business is going to come from I'll leave it at that but it's super super important it really is but ask great

thank you very much for your time really enjoy pleasure and it's a pleasure speaking to you absolutely thank you for

having me cheers Danny

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